Shelley: The Pursuit (New York Review Books) - Softcover

Holmes, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590170377 ISBN 13: 9781590170373

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2003

Synopsis

Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure." Expelled from college, disowned by his aristocratic father, driven from England, Shelley led a life marked from its beginning to its early end by a violent rejection of society; he embraced rebellion and disgrace without thought of the cost to himself or to others. Here we have the real Shelley—radical agitator, atheist, apostle of free love, but above all a brilliant and uncompromising poetic innovator, whose life and work have proved an essential inspiration to poets as varied as W.B. Yeats and Allen Ginsberg.

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Holmes is the author of Shelley: The Pursuit (published by NYRB Classics), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974; Coleridge: Early Visions, winner of the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year award; Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage, which won the 1993 James Tait Black Prize; and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, which won the 1990 Duff Cooper Prize and Heinemann Award. His other works include Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992. He is also a professor of biographical studies at the University of East Anglia. He lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.

Review:

"Shelley: The Pursuit achieves a superlative in biography: its subject's presence -- that of a disturbing, seductive, gifted, destructive man whose essence is mutiny. ... Holmes makes us feel the combination of originality, intensity, and dependency that made the poet so beguiling."

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1590170377
• ISBN 13: 9781590170373
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 830